AUGUST 16, 2016 MINDFUL MOMENTS IN MANOA

Honolulu folks –> No meditation this week only. This week’s mindfulness get-together is cancelled, as our daughter will be leaving to attend college in New York City. We do meet next week, 8.25.16.

Dear friends,

I am sure you have received those spam messages your email provider’s spam blocker missed – for unclaimed sweepstakes winnings and dubious products claiming to enhance all sorts of things.

If you were to actually go into your spam folder and sift through them to find relevant emails, you probably would never get anything done. Half your morning would be lost.

Add to that a few checks of what your friends are up to on Facebook, and suddenly its lunch time with nothing of value done.

Some writer, I forget who at the moment, wrote that mindfulness was like the spam filter for your inbox.

By practicing mindfulness meditation you get more and more tuned in with how your mind works and the kinds of thoughts its produces. Someone once remarked that in noticing how their mind produces some of what passes as thoughts, to call that “thinking” is charitable!

You see the flotsam and jetsam of your life flow by. Some of it makes no sense at all. Some of it is oddly distorted. Some of it pretends to be real, but on closer examination is subtly off.

Not to say all thoughts, mind you. But you get my drift.

By

doing this you quickly get to see the thoughts that belong in the spam folder as they arise, and gently, lovingly, press the delete key in your mind.

By getting into the habit of disentangling ourselves from useless chatter, little by little, we find that even the heavy thoughts become less heavy-duty.

As we unsubscribe from the many lists maintained by Greed, Anger and Delusion, we feel lighter, freer, happier, and thus, better able to respond to others with warmth and compassion.
Have a wonderful rest of your week.

Katina and I are here to support your meditation practice in any way we can.
Aloha,
Tom, Katina, Uilalani and Kupaianaha